To: Laurens who wrote (866 ) 1/12/1998 7:43:00 PM From: Dan Dieffenwierth Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1672
laurens, here is an article out about the SI "Bonk" this past weekend. Some people just don't have anything better to do. It's a shame. Hackers bonk Silicon Investor By Margaret Kane January 12, 1998 4:09 PM PST ZDNN Silicon Investor was brought down over the weekend by hackers targeting the company's Windows NT servers. Silicon Investor's Webmaster, Jill McKinney, who described the attack as a "bonk," said the assault began early Friday. The service was down until Saturday afternoon. The aim of a bonk -- also known as a denial-of-service attack -- is to shut down a Web site or ISP by flooding it with so much traffic that the servers overload. Bonks gained attention last year after such an attack knocked out New York-area ISP Panix. McKinney said she was flooded with E-mails from people who use the popular stock-talk Web site, which typically posts 8,500 messages a day. Silicon Investor still does not know what prompted the attack "There were no voice mails, no E-mails -- nothing. There was nothing that would lead us to identify the hacker, nor do we know that we are being singled out specifically or whether they're going after all Windows NT sites," she said. "I personally feel violated -- there's only three of us that work here, and we're sort of taking this personally," she said. Silicon Investor programmer Brad Dryer said the Web site has since installed the fix, "but we don't know if it's working or if the hacker just hasn't come back. We did see that someone is scanning for open port addresses on our router." [Click here for a patch that fixes the problem.] Dryer said Silicon Investor hasn't had many problems with hackers before. "It surprised us," he said. "We haven't been susceptible to attack for the past three years. We've always had people banging on our site trying to get in, but until now we haven't had anybody bring us down." Dan